Written by: Chris Ellis on May 17, 2014

I had every intention of taking this week’s D.Min assignment (to learn something new) and learning something  ‘exotic.’ Something that I had never done but that always intrigued me, something that would make me more of a renaissance man. I wanted to learn how to fly fish. Sadly though, a more necessary skill that needed to be learned presented itself this week.

We recently bought a house and it has a pool, and I know absolutely nothing about pools.  Zip. Zero. Nada. The previous owner said it was easy to maintain and that everything was working great. I was excited to open the pool last Saturday. I had visions of friends and family coming over to swim. My boys aren’t exactly fish in the water so I was especially looking forward to them getting more and more used to swimming. What was supposed to be an easy process that started on Saturday of last week, ended one week later.

After getting the tarp off the pool, I started the pool pump. For some reason it flipped the breaker. So I started it again and it continually flipped the breaker.  I had no idea why water was leaking out of the motor, but I figured it wasn’t a good thing. Being someone who believes I have more technical skills than I do, I like to figure things out for myself. So, I sat down and googled my pump and watched videos of it working, not working, and being disassembled.  After an hour of research I figured out I had a bad gasket.  I called the pool place and they wanted $500 to fix it. Ouch! That was a little pricey for a pool that was supposed to be in working order! So, I found the same pump on Amazon for $220 and decided to fix it myself.

Before the pump came in I watched even more videos of it being installed because I didn’t want to ruin the pump with a bad installation. Finally, the pump came in and I was meticulous with its installation. Before I turned the pump on, I had to switch a setting on the filter and all of the sudden water started shooting out of the backwash and I couldn’t stop it. I had a meeting at church so I left it shooting water out. When I got back home I had lost 7inches of water from my pool! I had no idea what my problem was. So, I went back to Youtube and watched more videos, this time on the filter. After taking the filter apart, I realized that I had a bad spider gasket. The pool place wanted $130 to fix and replace it. Being cheap, that sound like a lot of money so I did some more research and decided that I might salvage the part by coating it in a Polyurethane gel. I did it and it worked! My pool was ready… so I thought.

I read where you needed to have water tested so I took a sample down to a pool place and the pool expert spouted off all these chemicals I needed to put in it, how long I need to wait between applications, and everything else about ongoing pool maintenance. WOW! I knew it would be a steep learning curve, but I was feeling a bit overwhelmed and my brain was swimming (unfortunately not in my pool).

Wanting to make pool maintenance as simple as possible I created a system out of it. I put certain chemicals in the pool on some days and other chemicals on other days making maintenance easy.

I have to wait about 24 more hours and my pool will finally be ready.

So what was the result for me  this week? I didn’t learn anything exotic that would make me a renaissance man, but after about 15 hours of trial and error, research and practice I transferred myself into a pool boy!

Let’s swim!

About the Author

Chris Ellis